Fyre Fest Attendees to Receive $7,200 Each After Class Action Settlement
Almost four years after the organizers of the disastrous Fyre Festival were hit with class action lawsuits, a settlement has been reached between organizers and 277 attendees of the instantly infamous fest.
Billboard reports that the lawyers representing ticket holders and the trustee charged with Fyre’s assets reached a settlement where each of the victims in the class action lawsuit will receive $7,220, although that figure could be lower depending on Fyre’s bankruptcy case with other creditors.
A vote to approve the class action lawsuit settlement will take place May 13th.
“It’s a small but significant step for ticket holders who were defrauded and had their lives up ended as a result of the fraudulent conduct by [Fyre founder Billy] McFarland,” Ben Meiselas, partner at Geragos & Geragos and lead attorney for the class-action representing the ticket holders, told Billboard.
It was lawyer Mark Geragos who filed the initial $100 class action lawsuit against McFarland and his Fyre co-founder Ja Rule in May 2017, just days after the doomed festival stranded thousands of attendees in the Bahamas.
blogherads.adq.push(function () {
blogherads
.defineSlot( ‘medrec’, ‘gpt-dsk-tab-article-inbody1-uid0’ )
.setTargeting( ‘pos’, [“mid-article”,”mid”,”in-article1″,”mid-article1″] )
.setSubAdUnitPath(“music//article//inbody1”)
.addSize([[300,250],[620,350],[2,2],[3,3],[2,4],[4,2]])
;
});
“Shockingly, Defendants had been aware for months that their festival was dangerously under-equipped and posed a serious danger to anyone in attendance,” the class-action lawsuit stated. A second class action lawsuit was filed against McFarland just two days later.
In July 2018, McFarland — currently serving a six-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to fraud charges — was previously ordered to pay $5 million as part of a lawsuit filed by a pair of plaintiffs who paid for Fyre’s $13,000 VIP package.
